Empathy Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous
old empathy quotes, empathy sayings, and empathy proverbs, collected over the years from a variety
of sources.

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Empathy is about standing in someone else's shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.

Daniel H. Pink

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Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

Mohsin Hamid

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When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That's when you can get more creative in solving problems.

Stephen Covey

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All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.

Tahereh Mafi

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Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?

Marcus Aurelius

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A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.

Daniel Goleman

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Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Neil Gaiman

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Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something.

H. Jackson Brown

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Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Empathy depends not only on one's ability to identify someone else's emotions but also on one's capacity to put oneself in the other person's place and to experience an appropriate emotional response.

Charles G. Morris

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I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

Roger Ebert

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Empathy is a virtue, but it should not be a guiding judicial principle.

Gary Bauer

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Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction 'Love the neighbor as thyself.'

George Mcgovern

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Empathy means both understanding others on their own terms and bringing them within the orbit of one's own experience.

Jacob A. Belzen

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Empathy is full presence to what's alive in the other person at this moment.

John Cunningham

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You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

John Steinbeck

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Empathy is the lovefire of sweet remembrance and shared understanding.

John Eaton

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Empathy is like giving someone a psychological hug.

Lawrence J

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I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Maya Angelou

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I wouldn't expect someone who's been injured to hear my side until they felt that I had fully understood the depth of their pain.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

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Empathy is the only human superpower - it can shrink distance, cut through social and power hierarchies, transcend differences, and provoke political and social change.

Elizabeth Thomas

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Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.

Gloria Steinem

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Empathy needs no genius.

Toba Beta

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I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.

Walt Whitman

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Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other's good, and melt at other's woe.

Homer

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Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss.

Anderson Cooper

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If you share in a heart-felt sorrow, you can lighten the load of a friend. Sometimes facing the burden together can mend two broken hearts in the end.

Wes Fessler

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When a good man is hurt all who would be called good must suffer with him.

Euripides

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Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?

Andre Gide

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The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person.

Carl Rogers

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Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and ourself, a kind of attuning and understanding. When empathy is extended, it satisfies our needs and wish for intimacy, it rescues us from our feelings of aloneness.

Carl Rogers

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Empathy is putting yourself in another's shoes to find out what exactly that person is feeling or going through at the given time. It basically refers to being at a common wavelength with someone.

Deepa Kodikal

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Empathy is the greatest virtue. From it, all virtues flow. Without it, all virtues are an act.

Eric Zorn

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Empathy means both understanding others on their own terms and bringing them within the orbit of one's own experience.

Jacob A. Belzen

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We need to have empathy. When we lose empathy, we lose our humanity.

Goldie Hawn

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Empathy as a complex emotion is different. It requires awareness of the other person's feelings and of one's own reactions. The appropriate reaction may not be to cry when another person cries, but to reassure them, or even to leave them alone.

Frans De Waal

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You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view -- until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

Harper Lee

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We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.

Lydia Millet

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Empathy is the crucible of intercultural relations.

Carolyn Calloway-Thomas

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Loss of empathy might well be the most enduring and deep-cutting scar of all, the silent blade of an unseen enemy, tearing at our hearts and stealing more than our strength.

R.A. Salvatore

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Empathy is a powerful behavior of nurturing. When it is given properly, the receiver can feel that the giver really cares about them, and that what they are going through is not trivial.

William E. Krill

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If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.

Henry Ford

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Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.